What makes the young people of the Mosaic generation, those born between 1984 through 2002, different from members of other generations when they were 18-29 years old?
This is more of an escalator than an elevator, so I don’t think young people are now on floor 50, whereas when the Gen Xers or the Boomers grew up, we were on floor 0. We are all riding this escalator at the same time, and young people are at a significantly different cultural height than we’ve ever seen. Look at just some of the social and technological changes: fatherlessness, going from 5% to 41% births to single moms; institutional skepticism towards Christianity, government, media; everything’s being reinvented, even our economy is undergoing some significant duress. The pace of life is so much different, and a lot of that’s brought on by technology.
My contention is that if we were to look at our culture 50 years ago and 25 years ago and now, I think the spirit of the age is increasingly one like Babylon and the tower of Babel and is one of human self-centeredness, self- aggrandizement, and self-gratification, and a hedonism of technology, of hyper-individualism, of institutions becoming increasingly disconnected from human flourishing and more about the accomplishment of esoteric goals.
We’re in a period of significant alienation from the traditional ways that families and institutions have interacted with humans. Some of these institutions are reaching almost what you would think of as a breaking point. Can politics, can American government work in the way that it has for centuries? And this idea of spiritual authority and hyper individualism, everyone is their own spiritual authority.
When you combine all those factors, you have to start to conclude that young people are facing a different culture than we’ve ever seen before. So it’s our job to have spiritual discernment and cultural awareness to be faithful in that environment because today is different than the 1960s. It’s different than the 1970s when I grew up.
In one of the last chapters of the book, you recount a discussion with a friend that the church is not a collection of separate generations, but a group of people all living at the same time as one generation, being the church. Can you explain more about this idea?
After a conversation with an older friend, I realized I was thinking of “generations” in the church as one generation giving the next generation a faith to pass on, the metaphor of handing off a baton in a race. The church is the one place that ought to stand in opposition to that kind of segregated thinking. There’s a real opportunity for the church to imagine its role as a group of generations, an entire generation alive at one time, serving God’s purposes rather than simply the metaphor of passing on the baton. And that’s the metaphor of the body of Christ, that we all have different functions to serve. To have a whole demographic of 18- to 29-year-olds, 18- to 35-year-olds, essentially missing from most of our churches is a tragedy to that metaphor of the body of Christ.
This is a great opportunity for the church to reconnect; again, there’s a lot of really great things that are happening in that regard, in various families and various churches, so let’s recognize where it’s happening and celebrate it, then look for places where we need that new mind, that new courage to reconnect some of our differences and to begin to demilitarize some of the generational warfare that most of pop culture says is so important to us.
Cover image and author photo used courtesy of Dechant-Hughes & Associates.
